The Silver Dollar

The Silver Dollar

Ghent, MN

Reviewed August 28th, 2006

During the Great Depression Belgian farmers added their toil to the soil of Lyon County, Minnesota maintaining the traditions of their forebears and afterbears. They held their heads high, proud Flemish peasants. They savored their freedom from the oppression of the chocolate mines of the old Flanders, and the man named Ned who owned them all. But alas, one thing was still missing. They had their church, their prosperous farms, their Ghentian dignity, their strapping farm raised lads and lasses. But what about the beer?

Fie upon the land! For there was no beer in those barbaric, beerless times. Beer and spirits were, as they say in the flowery parlance of taciturn barristers, illegal. But the tide of thirsty Belgians could not be held back. Their parched vocal chords articulated songs of revolution. Their rolle bolle ball courts oozed with the tension of thirst not slaked. As soon as the crushing finger of prohibition was bent back (repealed) the Silver Dollar was the first saloon in Minnesota to open for business, also making it the oldest continually operating bar in the state.

For the seventy two years since prohibition's termination, the Flemish names of Bot, DeCock, Van Hueve, Llewiegie, McQuestion, Teerlinck, Verdroofufenzooben, and Jean Claude Van Damme have sounded in this great, oak covered, trophy studded hall, immortalized in the poetry of Southwest State University professors and the songs of their students. And what of those names now? Now they are remembered in the stories of elders, in the flower pots covered in the colors of the Belgian flag, in the empty rolle bolle courts, on the tombstones in the St. Eloi Cemetery, in the loamy, fertile farm dirt that is older than dirt, in the descendants who still reside in Ghent, still lay seeds in the earth, then water those seeds.

The Silver Dollar does not have bathrooms, lavatories, outhouses, loos, johns, or potties. It has waterclosets, decked out with ancient, old west style saloon doors. In the men's you'll find a trough urinal and a toilet. In the women's, a toilet. Left to my own devices, I stepped closer to the trough and wondered if great-great-grandfather Julius, and the 260 acres my family farmed just a few miles from here, for nearly a century. Was it a better life? Was it worth leaving behind chocolate, diamonds, furs, and the Smurfs - all the comforts of Belgium for this new life? Did Julius one day forsake his blue pants, baker's hat and psychedelic mushroom house in order to fully assimilate into American culture? Were his children teased for the merry songs they sang? Was this sort of teasing what lead the Van Dammes to become pioneer European martial artists? Only the bones of the St. Eloi cemetery can answer these questions, and they remain silent.

- Justin Teerlinck

RESTROOM RATING: 7
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